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8 Myths of Software-as-a-Service

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone-wants-to-go-back-to-the-dot-com-era dept.

abb_road writes "BusinessWeek looks at the current state of software-as-a-service, arguing that the model is well established and is distinct from failed ASP/Hosting models of the dot-com era. Far from a passing fad, the model is starting to see large-scale adoption, and traditional vendors are having trouble revamping their applications and financials to get in on the action. From the article, 'As SaaS gains mainstream acceptance, it is becoming an important disruptive force in the software industry. And as long as the quality and reliability of SaaS solutions continues to improve, the appeal of SaaS isn't going to go away.'"

4 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh goody! More buzzwords! by rolfwind · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah. It just sounds like more ways to extract money from the customer under a moniker. I didn't read the article so I don't know if they are talking about the consumer market or the commercial marketplace in this specific instance.

    But in the consumer market, ebay has been making it's auction software (blackthorne) a service for the longest time now, where it gets rented for 25 bucks a month (ever since they bought out the company who originally made it). Not too painful monthly, especially if your (small) business relies on it, but not many people would fork over $360 bucks a year, year in and year out, for what is essentially a mediocre (crappy and slow access database) program. It's hardly professional quality stuff, I may add.

  2. Re:Software is software, service is service by npsimons · · Score: 2, Informative

    If I don't pay for service, it would take a real philanthropist to provide service to me.

    And yet it happens all the time in the open source world . . .
    --
    Nathan's blog
  3. Fail-Fast by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Informative

    The good thing about Software As Service, is that instead of spend a few million dollars and a year figuring out some very expensive proprietary system is not going to work for you, you spend a few million dollars and six months finding out the software isn't going to work for you because systems architecture and setup are out of the picture (there is still upfront work involved of course in training and customizing, if the vendor allows that...).

    Thus the true innovation is that Software as Service allows you to holve wasted time on failed software rollout, and since time is money it literally pays for itself! :-)

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  4. i'm not sure but.. by ikejam · · Score: 3, Informative

    are we overlooking the main point?

    Lets say my company requires a customer relationship managememtn software. Among my options would be to buy a pre-deveoped, customizable software SoftwareA for whatever amount of money.

    Now the problem is I'll have to set it up, set the whole damn environment up. Servers, backups, networks, databases, user accounts, etc etc. Now i miht be able to get the guys who sell me this to set it up initially at probably a huge amount of money. Then ill have to get them to train my IT guys, who'll probably need documentation and baic training programmes, and some kind of structure ot account for employee rolloffs and new recruits etc etc..So thats a huge IT maintenance budget, with a whole lot of maintenance and training overhead.

    So instead the guys who make SoftwareA says, you pay us rent, we have this SaaS version of SoftwareA. You and your team can access everything using browser over the internet. We take care of installation 9its htis side, you wont even know it) and support. Here's our site, here are your login IDs, Here's our support number. Usr access policy sould be through a easy to use GUI, or in complicated cases through a authenticated request from authorised users to support. We have guys who's expert at htis sotware and were here 24/7 coz we have lots of customer who need the same thing. Our overhead is shared, and we have a lot of advatage in terms of training and maintenance.

    All you need is a reliable net connection. besides your travelling employees could access it anywhere.

    Ofcourse net connection gone = boom. and its a big risk for critical software. But reliabilty of the net is increasing and this will be critical, reliabilty of the SaaS companies would hopefully improve. if you can have redundancy (dialup to their data center? local backup systems would prboably defeat the purpose :-s)

    looks like it could work, esp in SMEs...